On the Mogollon Rim of Arizona. 4 – 6 May 2013

Our second daughter and I recently had a fun visit with our oldest daughter and husband in the beautiful White Mountains near Show Low, AZ.

A reminder:  Any photo can be enlarged by clicking on it.

I saw this Acorn Woodpecker numerous times outside their front window.  I have only seen them one other time and that was at Cochise Stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains in Southern Arizona.  It is such a neat looking bird I think and reminds me of a clown.  They eat both insects and acorns.  They will store thousands of acorns by jamming them into specially made holes in trees.  I read once that the reason they jam them in so tightly is to try to keep other critters such as squirrels from stealing them.  Pretty smart, huh?  You can’t see it real well here, but he has a bright red patch on top of his head.

This metal sculpture  of a raven in their yard looks very realistic I think especially from a distance.

Here’s another metal sculpture in their yard of a Horned Lizard (AKA Horny Toad).  I believe it is by the same artist.

This is a scrub jay, a frequent visitor to their yard.

We drove along the Mogollon Rim (pronounced Muggy-Own) to Heber-Overgaard for lunch and then went to a trailhead/lookout called Military Sinkhole.  I know there was military activity there during the 1800s as General George Crook came through here when he was fighting the Indians.  I’m not sure exactly where the sinkhole part was, but did see a little depression near there as shown in one of the photos.  The elevation here is 7,548 feet.  The Mogollon Rim extends about 200 miles (320 km).  It is the escarpment defining the southwestern edge of the Colorado Plateau.   I’m not sure how far it drops, but as you can see from the photos, it is a big drop-off.  We’re basically looking south toward Phoenix although it is many miles away.  They have a Visitor’s Center nearby, but it was still closed for the winter.

Next we headed south on the Black Canyon Road in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest which encompasses about two million acres in East Central Arizona.  As in our own Lincoln National Forest, there are pockets of private land.  Here we found a ranch with both horses and llamas.  We were fascinated by the baby’s markings.  Kind of looked like he had on a white hood.  😉 

I liked the llama, but also was fascinated by the “swiss cheese” rocks there.

It was interesting to see how the forest was doing after the horrible Rodeo-Chediski Fire almost 11 years ago now (June 18 – July 7, 2002) which burned 468,638 acres (732.247 sq. mi. or 189,651 ha).    We have now turned off Black Canyon Rd. onto Forest 300.  It is also called “The Rim Road” .  It runs very near the boundary with the Fort Apache Reservation home to the White Mountain Apache Tribe.    You can see from the photo below, this area is fairly denude of trees.  One would have to assume that this part was burned more intensely than some other areas we saw including the trees you see in the background.

We were looking to see how the forest was doing almost 11 years after the fire, but also were looking for feral/wild horses.  We were so excited when we found these three — stallion, mare, and the cutest little colt.   It seemed a little strange to see them in a forest setting rather than in an open area.  There are two theories as to how they got here, but might well be a combination of both.  One theory is that the fire burned down the fence along the Fort Apache Reservation boundary and that they came from there.  The other theory is that some people had to release their animals they couldn’t get out as the fire approached in hopes they could save themselves.   You will notice that in this area, the trees have survived the fire although it probably burned the underbrush then.

It was good to see in some areas there were baby ponderosa pines growing.  Before the fire, this area was considered the largest ponderosa pine forest in the world and may still be. 

Alligator Juniper is native to Central and Northern Mexico and the Southwestern U.S. (Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas).  We also have them in our mountains here.  You can easily see how it came about its name.

We looked and looked some more and were excited to find two more wild horses.  A stallion and a pregnant female.  There was more underbrush here and they didn’t stay long so difficult to get many good photos of them.  Here is the stallion.  We noted that both stallions we saw only had one mare each, but normally you would expect to see several to many mares per stallion.

The pregnant mare.

We had decided we weren’t going to get any more good photos and were in the vehicle getting ready to leave when the stallion came over by the road where we were for a very short time before heading on out. I thought our daughter and son-in-law’s backlit bottle collection was pretty neat.  The last picture in the series is of their reflection in a window.

This is another neat metal sculpture by the same artist as the raven and horned lizard.

Here you see lupine wildflowers in their backyard.  Before the Rodeo-Chediski Fire, this was as forested with ponderosa pines as where the wild horses were.   Some baby ponderosa pines and oak came up on their own.  The trees you see in the background were set out.  Thankfully, most of the ponderosa pines in front of their house survived the fire.

What a great visit we had, but now it was time to return home.  Here we are in New Mexico once again and come out of a mountainous area to the Plains of San Augustin (elevation 6,970 feet/2,124 m) about 50 miles West of Socrro, New Mexico.  If you look carefully on the right side of the photo, you will see some little white spots.   You are seeing some of the radio antenna of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s VLA (Very Large Array).   More on that later.

The Plains of San Augustin are also a prime place to see Pronghorn,  the second fastest mammal behind the cheetah in the world.   They are sometimes erroneously called “antelope”, but are not.  They are the only surviving member of the family Antilocapridae.  Both males and females have horns although sometimes they are barely visible in the females as you can see in some of the following photos.   The horns are made up of an outer hairlike sheath over a boney core.  Only the outer sheath is shed annually.  We saw a number of other groups on the drive across the Plains of San Augustin, but many were laying down or were too far away to get a good picture.

The VLA consists of 27 radio antenna (I don’t know if that number includes the spare they always have in the building to the right).   Each is 82 feet (25 meters) in diameter and weighs 230 tons.   The track they are on is “Y” shaped and I think something like 11 miles long.  There are four configurations used depending on what tests are being run.  The current configuration is the “C” formation.   At its highest resolution, it could see a golf ball 100 miles (150 km) away.   It was the setting in part for several movies including 1984’s “2010” and 1997’s “Contact” with Jodie Foster.  It is primarily used by astronomers from around the world.  If you would like to learn more about it or its sister project “Very Long Baseline Array” that is 10 radio telescopes over 5,000 miles (I have seen three of them.), there is much on the internet about it.  Pretty darn impressive methinks!!!   Enjoy!